Roger J. P. Kain - Böcker

The rural landscape of England and Wales in the mid-nineteenth century is minutely depicted in the large-scale plans and schedules drawn for the Tithe Commissioners. Among other features shown on the maps are field boundaries and rights of way, whilst the accompanying schedules record the names of owners and occupiers, field names, land use and area. The amount of detailed information they provide, together with their uniformity, place the surveys as the most complete record of the agrarian landscape at any period. This book describes the nature of tithe payments, the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 and the survey of over 11,000 parishes. The uses made of the surveys for reconstructing early field systems, for tracing land use and understanding farming practices, are systematically considered, The abstraction, computer processing and mapping of vast quantities of data are discussed.

The tithe surveys of the early Victorian Age, after the great Domesday Book of the eleventh century, represent the most detailed and important national inventory to be taken before our own times. This 1986 book reconstructs elements of mid-nineteenth-century rural landscapes and farming systems by analysing the wealth of quantitative data which these tithe surveys contain, communicated cartographically by a set of 582 computer-generated maps, and statistically by a series of tables. The book also reveals the richness and variety of written evidence which the 14,829 parish tithe files (P.R.O. Class IR 18) contain, by means of analytical place and subject indexes for each English and Welsh county (some 200,000 entries in all) and by essays in which themes commonly encountered in the tithe file papers of each county are described. These sections of the book will be an essential tool for historians and historical geographers.

This book offered the first comprehensive study of the enclosure mapping of England and Wales. Enclosure maps are fundamental sources of evidence in many types of historical inquiries. Although modern historians tend to view these large-scale maps essentially as sources of data on past economies and societies, this book argues that enclosure maps had a much more active role at the time they were compiled. Seen from this perspective of their contemporary society, enclosure maps are not simply antiquarian curiosities, cultural artefacts, or useful sources for historians but instruments of land reorganisation and control which both reflected and consolidated the power of those who commissioned them. The book is accompanied by a fully searchable, descriptive and analytical web catalogue of all parliamentary and non-parliamentary enclosure maps extant in public archives and libraries and offers an essential research tool for economic, social and local historians and for geographers, lawyers and planners.

The tithe surveys of mid-nineteenth-century England and Wales marked a new departure in government-sponsored, cadastral surveying of the nation's land. The 11,800 large-scale, detailed maps which they comprise are recognised as one of the most important sets of manuscript historical sources used by historical geographers and economic, social and local historians as well as lawyers representing clients in property and rights of way disputes and county and local planning offices. Despite this much acknowledged value, historians are not well served with indexes, descriptive catalogues or indications of tithe map coverage. A first object of this book is to provide a standard work of reference which will be an essential research tool for users of tithe maps. The database has also been analysed to reveal the general cartographic characteristics of this internationally important government survey.